Do success stories cause false beliefs about success?

That definitely isn't true. Tens of thousands of companies are bootstrapped every year. Some go on to be quite successful (Github, GoPro, Apple...).

You won't find all that many bootstrapped business founders posting on HN (it's run by an investment company...) but that doesn't mean they're not out there. Plus, due to the changing landscape of VC investing, most deals require a bit of traction before you even get a Series A. You have to bootstrap before many VCs will talk to you. There's also angel money, family and friends, etc, but getting that while you're pre-revenue is still much harder than proving the business is at least a bit viable first.

I'm starting to see this for myself and now i'm basically decided to ignore a lot of advice after consuming a lot of it.

Instead just to have a few goals and spend time in reflection to decide if they are still what I want and how that is working for me, what I need to do to get closer to them etc and let that decide the best routines.

So many things I hear that are apparently the answer to everything just doesn't work for me. Lots of popular productivity systems, journaling, getting up early, morning routines etc. I get that they can and do work for a lot of people, but the advise I feel is close to worthless as it matters what works for you and if you use trial and error and a reflective process you can figure that out for yourself, without needing the advice or at least i've heard enough of it to know what my options are now so what I need to do is consume less of that and adjust behaviours in my own life accordingly.

I think it comes down to the basic idea that life is way more complex than we can imagine, there is just so much at play and every little thing affects everything else, everyone works quite different and each environment and situation is also unique, bringing the exact same solutions to those things is silly, the only thing to do is adapt to it along the way, it's the system of evolution, but somehow we forget that and want some magical universal solution to avoid the chaos that the real world brings.

And due to the law of averages one of them will get lucky and be hugely successful from it... then the cycle repeats.

Yeah, and that makes sense. You need an OS you talk to the guy who has an OS first. What's not mentioned in any success story about MS is how they got to start talking with IBM in the first place after the negotiations for CP/M failed. It's not like they had an OS product.

Anyway, networking is essential to doing business, we all agree on it. What I'm saying is the "success story" is incomplete because it doesn't mention it. And so are most other success stories, perhaps in less obvious ways.